Upcoming Events

Twilio is making it easier to connect two people anonymously through text messages and phone calls with a new API launching today. Proxy will handle the task of provisioning phone numbers to connect people anonymously instead of requiring developers to handle that process manually.

The service is aimed at companies that would benefit from Twilio’s existing features but don’t want to spend much time setting everything up. The fully managed service automates the connection between a customer and an agent across popular platforms, including Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Slack, and Kik. It also automatically handles the provisioning of phone numbers for those connections, as well as content redaction and logging.

Most importantly, the service handles the task of masking the identity of conversation participants while still making it possible for them to communicate with one another.

Proxy’s simplicity may make businesses more likely to adopt Twilio’s services. Indeed, attracting new customers is key for Twilio, which revealed a few weeks ago that Uber — its largest customer — was scaling back use of the communication platform.

The new service’s content moderation and redaction functions enable businesses to block profanity from reaching their employees and can prevent the sharing of personal information, like credit card numbers. Administrators can limit how long Proxy sessions last, so the system can block customers from calling a past delivery driver, or vice versa. It can also be used to hand customers off from one agent to another as shifts turn over.

Proxy, which was announced as part of Twilio’s biannual Signal conference in San Francisco, is a component of the company’s broader suite of services, including APIs that allow companies to programmatically send text messages and phone calls.